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Month: February 2017

If you could walk everywhere instead of having to get in your car to drive half an hour to work, then five minutes to a lunch spot, then after work another ten minutes to the gym and finally a half hour back home, wouldn’t that add greatly to your quality of life? 30 + 5 + 10 + 30 = 75 minutes a day spent in your car. That’s over a full month of 8 hour work days spent just driving around. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just walk a minute or two and get to work, another couple of minutes to lunch, another few minutes to your gym then back home? You could use that time you have saved to start a business or spend more time with your family or just play video games.

We have many unacknowledged subsidies for driving cars long distances every day. Roads and police are paid for by the general public, not by those who drive the most.

Pollution cleanup and damage is either not paid for or is paid for by the general public – not those who drive the most.

Why are we continuing to subsidize driving when it is harmful for our happiness, our health, and our environment? Do we have other options?

I visited Hong Kong a couple of years ago and I think that that city has found a better way. Everyone there lives a short walk from the beach and a short walk from the mountains. Work is a few minutes walk away or a short subway ride (and the trains come every minute). Housing is more affordable because there are not artificial legal limits on how tall buildings can be… it’s a lot cheaper to rent a 3 bedroom apartment in a 100 story tower than a 4 story tower.

In LA, lots of communities have limited the size of buildings to under 4 stories (or even only to allow single family homes!). This has resulted in two major problems – there is no affordable housing, and we have sprawl 150 miles in every direction. Getting anywhere will require you to sit for hours in gridlock traffic. The hours spent in gridlock traffic makes people angry… and LA is a very angry city where people just don’t treat each other well.

My suggestion is that we end all subsidies of driving. Drivers should pay for road work, police, emergency services, etc through a very high gas tax. Oil should receive no subsidies.

Further, if we do better city planning, we could have a city like Hong Kong where even the poor live just a few minutes walk from the beach. Imagine 100 story towers a five minute walk from the beach down the LA coast. The entire city could live in an area a half mile wide by 15 miles long. We could have trains running in subways every minute – having a car would be silly. Unfortunately, LA is going the opposite direction as there is now a ballot measure attempting to prevent ALL new construction in LA basically.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night with this thought.
What do I mean by it? We should not do things today that make our future worse. We also should not sacrifice our happiness and fun today for an imagined tomorrow.

We should have a good balance of work for the future, as well as enjoying our days now.

I think we should plan more trips and fun activities together at home. Thoughts?

My opinion is that people grow apart if they don’t spend much time together. I think it is best that we always try to remain in person together each night. People who do long distance relationships or even have frequent separated trips sometimes grow apart or it even opens up opportunity for infidelity.

We also should really focus on doing fun activities together, both now and after we have kids. We should never focus so much on kids that we stop paying attention to each other.

Infidelity / sexual issues

I think it is very good that each of us is almost always willing to have sex if the other person wants to – this helps keep both of us satisfied and happy.

Men have extremely strong urges to spread their seed. I agree with this article that men are not necessarily predestined to cheat, but avoiding situations like trips alone or alcohol alone can help prevent issues. It’s the same thought process for why we don’t keep candy in our cupboards lol… we know we shouldn’t have it but if it is easy to get it is very hard to resist.

Money issues

I don’t think we have any problems here, we both share the same money philosophy

Emotional / physical abuse

No issues here

Parenting issues / arguments

What parenting issues do you think we will run into? How can we deal with them?

Addiction / alcoholism issues

I think this is a potential danger. Not really sure how to deal with it, but I guess it comes back to my idea from the first two points that we should stay together physically. I am a lot less likely to drink heavily when I am around you then when I am with friends.

I am building our copy management processes into Coalition’s internal toolset named Scoretask. The copy management process is quite complex and covers everything from assigning team members to work on a client, assigning keywords to every page (keyword sitemap), writing the page copy, title tags, meta descriptions, h1s, as well as handling accounting for our copywriters and tracking SEO performance of each page of copy.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all agree that the core element for success is focus. What is focus?

Focus is saying no to most things. It’s saying no to new business opportunities not in your core area, it is saying no to easy money in areas you think you can handle, it’s saying no so that you can say yes to core work that needs to be done.

Focus is putting in a lot of work and time into one narrow business area, even after you know more about that area than anyone else in the world.

I am going to go check out a new climbing gym near LAX today, Sender One’s second location. Max and I will do some leading on their super tall 80 foot walls. Hopefully our rope is long enough!

Climbing is a great sport. It’s very social, as half the time you are sitting around waiting for your arms to loosen up. It’s mental and requires a lot of planning and thought and remembering what moves to do to get up certain walls. It’s physically demanding and generally people who climb regularly are in superb shape. Emotionally, it builds confidence and courage to face your fears.

I am reading Code by Charles Petzold right now. Really fascinating story of how computers work! It is not just dry technical information, Charles builds on each area really explaining and helping understand how everything works from core principles.